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Google Code is shutting down: export your projects

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I agree with everything John Ratcliff said in his comments. Google Code has a really great and simple user interface unlike the clusterf**k that is Github. Why don't they charge a fee for the service instead? I'm pretty sure spam and other sorts of abuse would be reduced to zero instantly. This is just stupid and reeks of typical management penny-pinching.

And moving to hosting such as Sourceforge where they have completely embraced the malware economy? Not going to happen...
 
circuit said:
They get more evil by the day :-(
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It's not evil. It's a business decision. I think that 9 years of a free service with a nice, clean UI is something to thank them for.

As much as I prefer Google code, things change and nothing is going to be supported forever.
 
mbbrutman said:
http://google-opensource.blogspot.com/2015/03/farewell-to-google-code.html

After nine years Google Code is shutting down. There are some MS-DOS and vintage computer projects hosted on it, so if you know of something there that you like make sure it gets saved.
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I only know of one program called otla which allows you to enhance the loading times for loading cassettes.

Most annoying their closing down, they should be closing down Google Books which IMO is a total waste of space.
 
mbbrutman said:
It's not evil. It's a business decision. I think that 9 years of a free service with a nice, clean UI is something to thank them for.

As much as I prefer Google code, things change and nothing is going to be supported forever.
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It's a business decision that they forced, though. I can't imagine that SourceForge, for example, didn't have some of the same download abuse problems, but Google shut down downloads instead of trying to deal with it, and when people packed up and left said, "well, no one's using it, so we'll just shut it down."

So while I agree that Google owes me (and anyone else on Google Code) nothing, and I appreciate the hosting I got, it seems like they got the outcome they were shooting for. I don't consider that particularly honourable on their part. But hey, no contract, no complaining.

TenFourFox and Classilla already made the download jump to SourceForge, where we've been much better treated (even project of the month a couple times), and now I'll be finishing that transition for the rest of those projects.
 
How does honor come into the decision? Google felt the need to create Google Code to address a need back nine years ago. The need has faded away as traffic moved to Github.

I'm not happy about having to move my project but it's a fairly rational business decision. Google doesn't want to maintain what is effectively a stale service when better alternatives exist. That is a reasonable decision to have to make. Especially for a free service.
 
Honor comes into it because when you invite people to establish themselves in your ballpark (not coincidentally bringing in traffic and, at least for players of Google's size, revenue,) you create an understanding with them that they'll have a stable base of operations there, and because being a sound business decision does not make something automatically laudable. I might be perfectly within my rights to invite a hundred poor families to come settle down in my apartment building and then evict them after nine years of smooth sailing because their neighbors are too rowdy, but that doesn't make it not a dick move.
 
So let me see if I can summarize this correctly. Somebody started a service to fill a gap that they saw. They ran the service for free and never saw any revenue from it. (There were no ads there.) And then they finally looked around nine years later and decided that the world had moved on and that other sites were not only filling the need, but were far more popular. So they decided to gracefully shut things down, giving people nine months to migrate.

I don't see any dishonor in that. For anybody who thinks that is too distasteful, I'd stop using Google search, Google News, YouTube, Google public DNS servers, Gmail, search, docs, sites, etc. because one day one of them might be obsolete and get shut down, and you'll be further dishonored.

Like I said, I'm sad to see it go, but I'm happy to have benefited from it, even if only for four years. For the services that I truly depend on, I pay for them. For services that I use for free, I'm happy while it lasts.
 
mbbrutman said:
So let me see if I can summarize this correctly. Somebody started a service to fill a gap that they saw. They ran the service for free and never saw any revenue from it. (There were no ads there.) And then they finally looked around nine years later and decided that the world had moved on and that other sites were not only filling the need, but were far more popular. So they decided to gracefully shut things down, giving people nine months to migrate.
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I'm quite surprised at that because even back in 2006 advertising was part of paying for Internet Sites. I'm unsure when the services on my original Pascal Website on Geocities changed, I might of been 2010 or something like that when Yahoo was announcing Geocities was no longer going to be free and was going to cost be $5 to keep what I had and have the advertising along with it. I switched my site to Angelfire where it still resides along with the Video & Image advertising to keep the site a float. :(
 
mbbrutman said:
So let me see if I can summarize this correctly. Somebody started a service to fill a gap that they saw.
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Google Code wasn't exactly the first of its kind, although the way I read your posts, you seem to make it sound like that.
The 'Somebody' is not Google.
SourceForge has been around much longer, I am not sure if they were actually the first of their kind, but they were the first who were massively successful (sadly that Github nonsense has now taken over, riding solely on the popularity of Linus Torvalds and the Git-brand).
There were various others.
Eventually Google noticed this, and I guess they wanted to get a piece of the pie.

They ran the service for free and never saw any revenue from it. (There were no ads there.)
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That is a common business strategy though: offer it without ads to lure in users, and once you've gained enough marketshare, you turn on the ads.
Since Google never got much marketshare, we will never know if they were planning to put ads on it.
 
Scali said:
Google Code wasn't exactly the first of its kind, although the way I read your posts, you seem to make it sound like that.
The 'Somebody' is not Google.
SourceForge has been around much longer, I am not sure if they were actually the first of their kind, but they were the first who were massively successful (sadly that Github nonsense has now taken over, riding solely on the popularity of Linus Torvalds and the Git-brand).
There were various others.
Eventually Google noticed this, and I guess they wanted to get a piece of the pie.
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I don't know where you could possibly have read, or thought I implied that Google code was the first of it's kind. I came nowhere near saying that, and anybody who has been in the industry or community long enough is well aware of SourceForge.

According to the blog post, Google specifically says "We were worried about reliability and stagnation, so we took action by giving the open source community another option to choose from." That makes it pretty clear what their intentions were; anybody who was around will also remember how often SourceForge was unavailable.


Scali said:
That is a common business strategy though: offer it without ads to lure in users, and once you've gained enough marketshare, you turn on the ads.
Since Google never got much marketshare, we will never know if they were planning to put ads on it.
Click to expand...

news.google.com is a pretty popular site, and has been around for around 10 years. And it has never displayed advertising either. Not everything is an attempt to lure people in and trap them. Speculating that Google code was going to do that is nothing more than speculation, and poor speculation at that.

Let's not derail the thread any further; the point of the thread is to warn people to rescue their projects. The data is not going to be deleted anytime soon. If you like something, make sure it gets moved.
 
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